Over the last couple years I’ve been working on plug-ins for Maya to help make Daz Studio content a viable option for use in Maya. It’s been quite a quest. I originally started this journey to create the tools I need for my own personal projects, projects that have not yet all been revealed except to a few friends.

First, I wanted to have access to a wide variety of affordable characters and the ability to customize them quickly and easily, hence Daz Studio and Genesis 8 for Maya. Genesis 8 for Maya is necessary to be able to use all of Daz characters’s joint controlled morphs (JCMs) in Maya, so they deform properly, otherwise a large portion of their value is lost. It also helps streamline the workflow by setting up the character properly for export, it makes it easier to export additional blend shapes, and also helps make Daz Studio clothing more useful by exporting the JCMs for the clothing as well and making it easy to export adjustment morphs.

Next, I wanted to be able to use the materials for Daz Studio content quickly and efficiently. Manually converting shaders is a long and tedious process prone to error. Trying to convert an entire environment can take days, not to mention requires quite a bit of knowledge of render engines in general and their differences. This led me to start creating my LayLo3D Shader System. A plug-in I started around a year ago.

Finally, about a year later LoL, it’s getting close to release.

I would like to start to introduce what is possible with my next product, my LayLo3D Shader System.

This is a render of the results of using my plug-in to convert Stonemason’s Streets of Asia 2 from 3Delight to Arnold. No additional tweaking of the shaders was done after conversion. The only thing I did was set up an aiSkyDome light with a HDR image to light the scene and I hid the sky dome mesh that’s included with the Streets of Asia 2 environment so that it wouldn’t block the light from my aiSkyDome light.

It’s compatible with HumanIK (HIK) and doesn’t require the use of any specific HIK definition to work properly. It includes a HIK calibration tool to figure out your custom HIK definition and then work accordingly.

It automatically converts pose from Genesis 3 to Genesis 8 and from Genesis 8 to Genesis 3.

It has a built in “Pose Mixer” feature that allows you to right click on a pose in it’s library and select which limb from the preset you would like to take the pose information from and apply it to your characters corresponding limb.

It includes a “Custom HumanIK” pose library allowing you to save your own HIK poses complete with a snapshot of the pose for easy reference. If you don’t use HIK it has one for poses based off the characters joint rotation values as well.